Britain: Sectarianism, the elections and the demise of the SSP

The recent election results across the country not only contain lessons for the Labour Party. These elections also reveal some important lessons from those who have attempted to build an alternative to the Labour Party, the most notable of these being the Scottish Socialist Party.

Not so long ago, the sectarians argued that this party was the most promising and successful initiative in creating a socialist alternative to Labour. Its leader, Tommy Sheridan, had a proud history of struggle behind him and was well known in Scotland for his stand against the Poll Tax. At the last Scottish Parliamentary election, the SSP picked up six members of parliament and some 70,000 votes.

It was hoping to increase its representation at this election and put down the marker as Scotland's official socialist opposition. But those dreams have turned to dust. The SSP had already split into two hostile camps, intent on fighting one another. This election resulted in their political collapse.

The leaders of the SSP, which came mainly from the old Militant Tendency, had developed delusions of grandeur and were looking for a quick road to success - in reality they were looking for a shortcut to building a genuine revolutionary party. Over the past 16 years they have been trying to build an alternative to the Labour Party, swinging from ultra-leftism to opportunism. The SSP was supposed to be the answer to Scottish nationalism and the real way forward for the working class in Scotland. After the SSP was set up, we were told that it was the fastest growing socialist party in Europe and it was going to break the mould of politics. There was no shortage of boasting of what they were going to achieve. When the SSP gained six seats in the Scottish Parliament, this was regarded as a decisive breakthrough and the sky was the limit.

However, this need for quick successes resulted in the new party watering down its socialism for more "realizable" aims. Norway now became the great model to which Scotland should aspire! The idea being that Norway is a small country rich in oil, and Scotland could be the same. Amazingly they ignored the little detail that Norway is a capitalist country. Such opportunism was then mixed with nationalism as the party came out for Scottish independence. Sheridan even accused the SNP of not being nationalist enough!

This mixture of opportunism and ultra-leftism was a recipe for disaster. Sure enough, things took a massive turn for the worse. After their successes in 2001 and in 2003 (where they secured 128,000 votes) their support started to decline. In the 2005 general election the vote for the SSP fell by 40% compared to 2001. In 2005 the SSP secured only 1.9% of the poll in Scotland (43,516 votes), a fall from the 3.1% (72,518 votes) achieved in 2001. Today, its vote has collapsed to 12,831 (0.6%) and the party has lost all its six SMPs. One SSP leader, Alan McCoombes, described the election result as a "massacre".

By pandering to nationalist prejudices, instead of being the "antidote" to nationalism, the SSP became a conduit for transferring votes to the SNP. Many must have thought, ‘if nationalism is the answer, then I may as well vote for the real thing, the SNP'.

Last year the SSP had split over the Sheridan Scandal, when Sheridan took the News of the World to court over allegations of sexual impropriety. The leaders of the SSP refused to support Sheridan. Eventually Sheridan won his court case against Murdoch, and led the new breakaway from the SSP named Solidarity. Then began the in-fighting between the SSP and Solidarity in the run up to the present Scottish elections.

"Solidarity, Scotland's Socialist Movement is clearly making a big impact. A recent poll has indicated that 7% of people in Scotland were likely to vote for Solidarity in the May Scottish parliament elections", stated a recent statement from the tiny Taaffe grouping in Scotland, which had hitched their fate to Sheridan's Solidarity. They, like Sheridan, were living in a dream world. As the results showed, Solidarity managed only to scrap1.6% of the vote. Sheridan lost his seat. Solidarity lost everything except one single council seat in Glasgow.

The whole sorry episode has been a complete disaster. There are no short cuts to success. There is no way you can simply jump over the mass organizations. Many of the SSP leaders were former members of the Militant Tendency who had abandoned their Marxism in the "New Turn" for rapid growth. Everything was thrown overboard: Marxist theory, principles and methods. They had forgotten everything and learned nothing. Without these fundamentals, it is not possible to build anything. The disastrous experience of the SSP/Solidarity is ample proof of the fact that this search for shortcuts leads to nowhere. As Ted Grant explained long ago, it was a "detour over a cliff". In the process they miseducated and destroyed a whole layer of workers and youth, who are now completely disillusioned with this fiasco.

In order to change things, you have to take things as they are and not how you would like them to be. The sectarians treat society as a great school, with themselves as the teachers. In their opinion, the working class should come to its senses, put aside less important matters, and assemble without fuss around the teacher's podium. There they will be instructed as to what is to be done.

Every time the going gets tough and the Labour Party shifts to the right (as it has done many times over the last 100 years), these sectarians immediately start jumping up and down. In true sectarian fashion, they write off the mass organizations (which have been built up for generations) and proclaim themselves as the new way forward. If only the working class would sit up and listen, then everything would be solved!

The sectarians in England and Wales have the same approach. The so-called Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) regularly launches vitriolic attacks on the Labour Party and denounces all those who have a perspective of changing the Party. Ironically, they were originally in the Labour Party and known as the Militant Tendency. But with the shift to the right the leaders of the majority lost their bearings and abandoned the Labour Party in 1992. As a result of this they believed they would grow by leaps and bounds. Of course, events have proved otherwise. They have been reduced to a rump.

They may explain away the fiasco in Scotland with the fact that Tommy Sheridan and the other leaders of the old Militant Tendency in Scotland broke with the Militant. But how do they explain what happened in Coventry? Coventry was a traditional stronghold of the old Militant in England. Here through patient work over many years the Militant became a serious force within the Labour Party. Eventually one of its supporters, Dave Nellist, was elected as Labour MP for Coventry South East in 1982. He became a model Socialist Member of Parliament, lived on a workers' wage and was widely respected within the Coventry labour movement and beyond. In 1992 he was removed bureaucratically from his position and stood against the Labour Party. The first time he stood he came quite close to actually winning. As the sitting MP and with widespread support among the working class this was not a surprise. What should have made the leadership of the Militant think was the fact that even with these very favourable conditions Dave still failed to win. Since then his vote has gone down and down. In 1997 it went down to around 3000.

To make up for their losses on the parliamentary front they then concentrated on municipal politics, first winning two councilors and then a third. When they won their third councilor they boasted that they were the "third" group on the council, after Labour and the Tories. Well, in last week's election they lost one of the three, in St. Michael's ward, one of the traditional strongholds of the Militant and later the Socialist Party. They lost the seat to the Labour candidate, who was the e-convenor of the Peugeot plant who faced redundancies last year.

If ever there was a situation when an "alternative left candidate" should do well, surely that situation exists today! Labour is very unpopular and losing votes everywhere. And yet in Coventry the Labour Party won 4 seats, two off the Tories, one off the Lib-Dems and one off the Socialist Party! Coventry has traditionally been a Labour twon, but the last few years have seen the Tories make a comeback and they took the council. That may explain why Labour is making a comeback now. The workers of Coventry have had a taste of the Tories and they logically have turned to their traditional mass organization, the Labour Party, reducing the presence of the Socialist Party while they were at it!

As the forces of the Socialist Party have dwindled (first the loss of their forces in Scotland, followed by a big fall in Liverpool, two of their traditional strongholds) they have moved even more ultra-left. It is ironic in fact even to follow the vicissitudes of the change of their name. At their peak, when they had three MPs, controlled Liverpool Council, led the mass protests against the Poll Tax and so on, they modestly referred to themselves as a "tendency". Now that they are much smaller, they call themselves a "Party".

Ted Grant used to repeat over and over again that a revolutionary need two things, a sense of proportion and a sense of humour. The leaders of the Socialist Party lost their sense of proportion a long time ago. Hopefully for them, they may still have a sense of humour. Otherwise how will they cope with the disastrous results of their policies?

They have declared that the Labour Party is completely bourgeois and utterly finished as a vehicle for the working class interests. It is the same approach as sectarians in the past who wrote off the trade unions under the control of the right wing. The sectarians were wrong in the past and they are wrong today.

The Socialist Party has now launched a new initiative: the Campaign for a New Workers' Party. The Labour Party can't be changed so the working class must set up a new party. Hey presto! The problem is solved! All that needs to happen is for the working class to gather around this idea, like the teacher's podium.

The problem is that it is a non-starter. For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the British working class will see that the working class does not move in this way. The Labour Party (not to be confused with the Blairites) has deep roots in the working class going back over generations. The working class does not break lightly with its organizations, despite their leadership, especially for a sect or a "campaign".

The problem is not with the working class, which hasn't moved en masse at this stage, but with the sectarian's lack of confidence in the working class. They talk about the inability of the working class to change the Labour Party, due to the lack of democracy in the party. The sects used this argument in the past about not being able to change the TGWU, the GMB or the EEPTU. But they were proved wrong! When the working class moves no amount of bureaucratic rules will prevent it from changing its organizations. That has been the lesson of history, and it is for Marxists to learn the lessons of history and not repeat its mistakes.

Above all, if you have no confidence in the working class to change its organizations (including the Labour Party), what confidence can there be in the working class in changing society? Clearly, if the workers have no hope in the changing of their own organizations, there must be a very bleak outlook indeed for socialism in Britain! In fact, the tasks are intrinsically linked together. Before the working class will move to change society, they will first of all attempt to transform their traditional organizations from top to bottom. This is quite logical as workers draw different conclusions at different times and tend to take the line of least resistance. The call to set up a new Labour Party has been tried, of course, in the form of Scargill's Socialist Labour Party and the Scottish Socialist Party. Both of these adventures have now sunk like a stone. The same applies to the Socialist Alliance. The other example of Respect has been stillborn and will disappear as with the rest.

The sectarian does not understand the dialectical inter-action between the finished programme (socialism) and the living (imperfect and unfinished) mass struggle of the working class. In other words, they turn their back on the actual development of the working class and construct their own artificial movement in their heads. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that you have to take reality as it is and not what you would like it to be.

The example of the demise of the SSP/Solidarity is a further example of how it is not possible to circumvent the mass organizations. Those who attempt this course only end in a mess.

Those who had swelled heads in 1991 in the leadership of the Militant Tendency thought that they knew everything. When Ted Grant insisted on always going back to the fundamentals they ridiculed him. He tried to warn them, but they would not listen. Now they have ended up down the same old sectarian path.

At that time they still had some memory of their own past when they wrote: "Of course, it is necessary to avoid the quagmire of ultra-leftism. As a tendency, we have always resisted the temptation to run too far ahead of events, to overestimate our own forces, to rush into rash and reckless decisions which we would later regret. History is littered with the corpses of would-be revolutionary groups who have run aground on the rock of ultra-leftism."

Today, the SSP/Solidarity is another corpse of a "would-be revolutionary group". And the Socialist Party is going down the same road.

Our task is not to chase phantom armies, but to patiently explain to the advanced sections of the working class and the youth of the need to understand the nature of the crisis that faces us. To understand that only through a clear socialist programme can the issues facing the workers be resolved. Only by transforming the mass organizations and constructing a strong Marxist tendency will the vehicle be created to carry through this historic task.

• Britain: Labour’s electoral setback - Time to Change Course! by Rob Sewell (May 8, 2007)
• Scotland—Socialism or Nationalism? by Ted Grant (March 18, 1992)
• The New Turn – A Threat To Forty Years Work (1991)